Wacky Facts

Celebrated in Punjab on 13 January, Lohri marks the end of the coldest days, with sesame, jaggery and popcorn thrown into a bonfire.

A Monty Python sketch in which “Spam” is repeated endlessly gave its name to junk messages.

Architect Jørn Utzon solved the roof geometry by making all shells sections of the same sphere.

Column 16,384 is labelled XFD. Press Ctrl+Right Arrow on an empty row and you will land there.

In 1981 N. R. Narayana Murthy began Infosys with six colleagues; the seed money came from Sudha Murty’s savings.

That is why the ₹1 note carries the signature of the Finance Secretary rather than the RBI Governor.

By slowing their heart rate, sloths can stay underwater for up to about 40 minutes.

They turn anticlockwise north of the equator and clockwise south of it, due to the Coriolis effect.

Pando in Utah is a single quaking aspen with about 47,000 stems connected by one root system.

Introduced around 2010, SAP HANA stores data primarily in RAM and in columns rather than rows, which makes large analytical queries far faster than traditional disk-based databases. It is the foundation of SAP S/4HANA.

Pluto’s diameter is about 2,377 km; the Moon’s is about 3,475 km. It was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.

He reached his 100th international hundred in March 2012 against Bangladesh — 51 in Tests and 49 in ODIs.

IBM engineer David Bradley created it for the original IBM PC so developers could reboot without switching off the power. The keys were chosen so nobody would press them by accident.

In 1839 a Boston newspaper used “O.K.” for “oll korrect”, a jokey misspelling of “all correct”. It spread through an 1840 election campaign.

The text covers taxation, trade, law and statecraft and is attributed to Kautilya, also called Chanakya.

Sound needs a medium such as air to travel. Space has so few particles that sound waves cannot travel between them in a way your ears could detect, so an explosion next to you in space would be silent.

Released in 1960, it was later colourised and re-released in 2004.

Sea stars use a nerve net instead of a brain, and pump sea water through a water-vascular system instead of blood. Many can regrow lost arms.

Moravec’s paradox: high-level reasoning like chess needs relatively little computation, while walking, grasping and recognising faces — which children do effortlessly — are extremely hard for machines.

Released in 2020, GPT-3’s 175 billion adjustable numbers made it more than 100 times larger than GPT-2. Each parameter is just a number nudged during training.

Tiny marine plants called phytoplankton carry out a large share of Earth’s photosynthesis.

Most substances shrink when they solidify, but water molecules lock into an open hexagonal crystal as ice. That is why ice floats, pipes burst in winter and lakes freeze from the top down, protecting the life below.

It flows about 2,500 km from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal and supports hundreds of millions of people.

Pharmacist Caleb Bradham sold it as Brad’s Drink in 1893 and renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898, possibly after the digestive enzyme pepsin.

Tim Berners-Lee proposed the Web at CERN in 1989 so scientists could link and share information. The first website went online in 1991.

Iron expands in the heat, so the tower can grow by up to about 15 cm on hot days and shrink again in winter.

Tamil inscriptions go back over 2,000 years, and it was declared a classical language of India in 2004.

West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu called Union Minister Sukh Ram on 31 July 1995.

It is the third-largest ocean and has the warmest surface waters, which strongly influence the South Asian monsoon.

Take a four-digit number with at least two different digits, sort digits high-low and low-high, subtract, and repeat. You always reach 6174 — Kaprekar’s constant, found by Indian mathematician D. R. Kaprekar.